social software

September 16, 2009

Lately, over the past couple of months, I have been doing a high number of customer briefings and traveling a lot. The workload increase has been noticeable for those following me either via this blog or through Twitter. One of the slides that has been well-received is one that I use to peel away the different terms associated with social computing. This is not the only way to look at the topic - and not necessarily the right way for all possible situations when you are trying to advise someone on a particular strategy or question. However, Figure 1 below helps with the conversation I have with people on the topic. It seems to add value and remove some of the confusion that people have when it comes to "social everything".

What I've tried to illustrate more than "define" are how different terms and memes relate to one another. Again - it's not a perfect chart. If I had to define social computing more purely, I'd lean more towards definitions used by academic institutions or by social computing research labs of major vendors (e.g., HP, IBM, Microsoft). But in more simple terms - I find people thinking of social computing transition to a conversation on social media, social networking, or social software. Other times - especially when it comes to mobility - the discussion tends to anchor itself around devices and their form factors (e.g., iPhone) as well as what's possible (in terms of application scenarios given connectivity advances (e.g., location services, augmented reality).

But we also need to learn from history and see things in both an evolutionary as well as revolutionary lens - so collaboration, content, communication and productivity discussions - long time initiatives across many organizations are still very credible pursuits with relevant business benefits. Interestingly, these conversations often include debates on the merits of the same underlying social software tooling that comes up in conversations related to other domains such as social media. For instance, blogs comes up in multiple contexts, as do communities and wikis - it becomes a circular discussion as people try to describe these domains by tools ("what is") rather than by their application ("how used"). Web 2.0 and Enterprise 2.0 are additional memes that have been kicked around for some time with additional debate as to what exactly is included in those terms when it comes to tools.

For example - if social media includes blogs and communities - then what makes it different from Web 2.0? Or, if Enterprise 2.0 includes wikis, then how is that different than collaboration (joint work)? When you describe domains by tools - you'll never get out of this endless debate - which promted me to create the simple illustration in Figure 1.

Figure 1

And yes, I agree totally that this is not purely a technology discussion but that's not the point I'm trying to convery with this illustration. What you'll notice (based on the color coding of social software) is that social software becomes the ingredients more-or-less for these other terms and memes to dip into. Social software answers the "what is" while the other terms describe "how used". This does require you to agree with a very broad definition which I have leveraged from Clay Shirky, who made three interesting statements on social software:

“It's software that supports group interaction.“

Every time social software improves, it is followed by changes in the way groups work and socialize.“

"One consistently surprising aspect of social software is that it is impossible to predict in advance all of the social dynamics it will create."

That lead me to the illustration depicted in Figure 2 - that social software has been around for a very long time - and has constantly evolved while being called many different names (e.g., groupware, etc). Again - Figure 2 is not meant to be the only way to look at the topic - just one way to help people clarify the confusion out there so they can formulate what all of 'it" (social media, Enterprise 2.0) means to them, the people they are delivering solutions for, and the organizations they support.

Figure 2

When we think of social software in terms of "waves" (with all due respect to the Google folks), coupled with maturing platforms, infrastructure and networking services - you can actually clear up a lot of confusion that people have when they try to de-tangle all the jargon out there and begin focusing on what is really more important - the people and organizational aspects unrelated to the various technology debates.

Hopefully this helps... I used these slides to level set groups as to what my research focus is here at Burton Group. While I tend to summarize it as covering social computing - the technology aspects are only one component of my research - in reality, what I end up spending more and more time on is exploring how social formations and participatory cultures emerge - and how IT augments relationship structures and behaviors. While somewhat academic - it does better describe where I am right now.

It clearly has been a while since I've posted on a regular basis on our service blog. Apologies for the absence (a combination of workload, travel, vacation, workload - rinse and repeat). So here are some posts on my personal blog that might be of interest:

Social Graph Engines Very likely to be one of the next "big battles" for those trying to scale social networking and related tools/applications. Anyone have other candidates to keep track of? The one's below might be the start of a watch-list of sorts...

Enterprise 2.0 Conference: Real Stories From Real People Given the economy, and restrictions on travel in many organizations, the Enterprise 2.0 conference still managed to present many stories from "real people" doing "real stuff" under the banner of "Enterprise 2.0". I did a quick pass through "by day" view and thought it would be nice to call out these individuals (as well as their respective organizations) and thank them for taking the time to come to Boston and share their experiences. Note: The conference is being run again in November - location - San Francisco.

Community Equity, SunSpace, FOAF+SSL, & KiWi If you are following open source developments related to social networks, communities, and/or the semantic web, these three efforts (Community Equity, FOAF+SSL, and Kiwi) should be of interest...

June 30, 2009

Another option for those wishing to leverage attendance at Catalyst (on top of all the great Burton Group workshops, sessions, guest speakers, etc). Alice Wang and I will be exploring the intersection between identity and social networking during the workshop below:

Use Cases Driving Identity in Enterprise 2.0: The Consumerization of IT

We will hold a pre-conference workshop at the Burton Catalyst North America 2009 conference on Monday, 27 July 2009, from 10am to 5pm, in San Diego, California. Participate in this working session as end users, deployers and technology providers discuss identity-based use cases reflecting the intersection of traditional enterprise with Web 2.0 and SaaS, models with consumer underpinnings that are turning traditional IT approaches inside-out. The group will problem-solve together to discover and define:

Different styles of provisioning/federating identities

Privacy concerns around unmanaged employee usage of outside tools

Security and policy approaches to address virtualization and the cloud

In Concordia workshops, real-world use cases rule: we work together to understand trends and requirements, and then facilitate effective results in future technology development and harmonization. We have gathered use case presentation and discussion proposals, detailed below, in order to form the workshop agenda.

Registering to attend

It is free to attend this Concordia workshop; you just have to let us know you're coming. You can do this by adding your name to the list below or by sending mail to Britta Glade (britta at projectliberty.org).

If you are also planning to attend the Burton Catalyst conference taking place during the rest of the week, you can get a fantastic Catalyst discount for attending this workshop! Use the code concordia when registering on the [Catalyst site to get a full-conference price of $1,295 (this is an almost 50% discount for non-Burton Group clients who would normally pay $2,495 to attend).

May 31, 2009

There is a great deal of "irrational exuberance" about Google Wave in the news right now given its current state (pre-beta). While prognostications on how it will derail existing solutions make for good press coverage, such statements should be viewed as part of the natural enthusiasm when something creative and innovative comes along. This is a ways off...

...Despite this plug-in, I still believe IBM has made a fundamental and perhaps unrecoverable competitive mistake by not being radically more aggressive regarding SharePoint integration. The window for IBM to have entrenched itself in "SharePoint shops" for social computing is just about closed in my opinion given that Microsoft will begin talking about the next version in greater detail later this year.

...However, there are some nuances in the deal. The focus of the partnership is between Saba's platform and IBM's WebSphere platform, not the Lotus software stack. Specifically, there was no mention of what the deal means in terms of Lotus Connections and Saba Social.

In August, 2007 Microsoft announced its intent to acquire Parlano. Parlano's leading product, MindAllign, delivered "persistent group chat". After the acquisition was completed, Microsoft has kept quiet on exactly how it would adapt Parlano's technology and deliver it as part of Office Communications Server (OCS). With OCS R2 launched in February 2009 that mystery has been resolved...

Oracle makes the case the collaboration has been fragmented across three major domains (Enterprise Messaging, Team Collaboration, and Synchronous Collaboration). This has resulted in tools being deployed that are more costly for organizations to deploy and maintain from an infrastructure and operations perspective. At least that's the argument. There are some key points to consider however (for a brief analysis of Beehive, read the full post):

Social messaging, sometimes referred to as micro-blogging, has become incredibly popular on the Internet, exemplified by soaring use of consumer services such as Twitter. Twitter’s growing audience has raised questions as to whether such communication models are applicable within the enterprise. Strategists are considering social messaging as a means to improve not only information sharing and collaboration but also facilitate social networking and community building. There are concerns however. How does social messaging conflict with ongoing unified communications efforts (e.g., instant messaging)? What level of security and compliance requirements are there for these tools? Join Principal Analyst Mike Gotta of Burton Group, along with CEO Tim Young of Socialcast and CEO David Sacks of Yammer as they discuss all of these topics and address questions from audience participants.

From a journalist’s perspective I suppose they are correct. For Boultin maybe the blogosphere is getting a little crowded:

“Today, a search for, say, Barack Obama's latest speech will deliver a Wikipedia page, a Fox News article, and a few entries from professionally run sites like Politico.com. The odds of your clever entry appearing high on the list? Basically zero.”

But, do you think the 70+ million blogs are all competing for attention on stories about Barack Obama? Not a chance. Many of these people could care less about building an audience that competes with Wikipedia or Politico and are simply sharing ideas with people who have similar interests or ideas.

It’s a little more difficult to understand Gillmor’s reasoning about the death of RSS at the hands of Twitter. He points to RSS feeds that do not carry the full text of a blog post as something that “carved out a large percentage of the value of the day’s news.” Gillmor then goes on to wax poetic (seriously, he quotes Bob Dylan) about the “race for realtime” where Twitter can get news out quicker than an RSS feed. Well, OK, for a journalist I suppose realtime news is important. But does it make that much difference if you read feedback about the latest Obama news conference a few hours later?

I am not saying any of these technologies are bad or that the next big thing isn’t, well, the next big thing. But excitement for many of these emerging social tools can start building from these same journalists. As an IT professional, what can you do with this social media tail chasing? First, you can be skeptical of anything that is over hyped (or anything that is totally trashed) as much as these technologies have been. Second, you need to stay focused on understanding your enterprise’s needs better than anyone else. Only then can you truly assess whether the next big thing can make a difference.

By the way, my report “Making Smart Choices for Online Workplaces” was recently published. It provides a framework and approach for assessing how these and other technologies can improve online work environments and knowledgebases. I’ll also be talking about this subject at Catalyst North America in July. I hope to see you there!

March 20, 2009

Burton Group recently announced the completion of a field research project to determine how organizations are approaching social networking (see Field Research Study: Social Networking Within the Enterprise). The interviews were only very lightly guided, so respondents got to guide the conversation where they wanted to go. It was telling that quite a few of them, when asked to talk about social networking, wanted to talk about portals. In fact, one third of the 29 organizations interviewed steered the conversation to portals at some point. This point occurred in one of two places: when talking about how social networking could bolster an existing, successful portal – or how it could replace a failed portal.

First, replacing a failed portal effort with social networking. Respondents in this category indicated they had failed in attempts to create a portal to address generic “knowledge management.” One idea is that perhaps social networking will offer a better route to KM than portals since it focuses on human interconnections rather than collecting data assets. For example, one organization said they had an “older KM Portal previously established, but information was hard to find and use,” so now they were interested in social networking.

In other cases, portals failed to get off the ground due to endless planning. One respondent indicated “They have not deployed yet after a year and a half of planning but are now looking to go to a collaboration platform”. Another organization had different internal constituencies (IT, corporate communications, and HR) come into conflict as they forced the portal in different directions. For this organization, the result has been a portal effort that has been stalled for over 3 years. We recommend time boxing portal implementations to be six to nine months (the longer time being for large enterprise deployments) to avoid analysis paralysis.

If a social network is being launched from the ruins of a portal effort, one has to seriously ask why the social network is expected to succeed when a portal failed. If the answer is that a focus on connecting people to people is really what the organization needed rather than connecting people to applications and content then you may be on the right track. But if the answer is that the new technology is better or more exciting, expect failure for the same reasons the portal failed: lack of business buy-in, poor or no governance, poor adoption resulting in a failure to reach a critical mass of users, analysis paralysis, and no business proposition for solving problems the users can recognize.

Now that I’ve discussed using social networking to replace a failed portal effort, I want to move on to the more cheerful subject of using them together. The path is clearer for organizations with successful portal efforts that want to add social networking in. Portals act as a personalized hub for applications, content, collaboration, and processes. This puts them in a unique position to reach people in a role-based manner who may want to interact in a social network. Through integration, social network sites can inject people and relationships into the portal interface. One interviewee explicitly mentioned that it “would be interesting to add people and relationships to the portal user interface and experience ... to surface social networking in the portal.” Another mentioned they were interested in hanging community features off of their new, open source portal. This makes sense since portal infrastructure is often used today to create role-based portal sites. For example, one respondent had separate portals for employees, alumni, retirees, and a women’s network. By adding social networking technologies, these existing portals could become even more powerful mechanisms for connecting people with similar interests that may not come in casual contact during their workday.

Note that in this model the portal is not itself a social network, but it can work with the social network site. The SN site may have portlets or widgets that the portal can consume, APIs that custom-written portlets could access, or (worst case) screen scrape summary information the network site. The portal could also provide links to contextually relevant social network sites. The social networking site simultaneously exists as a destination for use when social networking is a primary activity and can point to information in the portal. In this way the portal and the social network site can each play to their strengths and make each other stronger and more successful. The portal provides the back-end integration (directory, single sign-on, implementation of portlet standards, portlets connecting to enterprise applications) and front-end presentation (in a personalized, screen real-estate metaphor) for building portal sites. However, the SN site is probably not built on the portal framework. The SN site provides the ability to define an online persona, list connections, receive notifications on the activities of those connections, participate in inter-personal, group, or community activities, and control social networking permission, preference, and privacy settings. It’s a great combination and one we expect to see more frequently.

The webcast will show up under "Recorded" with a date of March 18, 2009. It's about 45 minutes in length. Feel free to leave comments/questions here and I'll answer them as quickly as possible.

If you are interested in the topic of enterprise social networking, I will be running a workshop on the topic which will go much further into the results from this field research project.

Burton Group's Catalyst conference will be in San Diego, July 27-31. Catalyst is a very unique attendee experience. If you are interested, check out the conference site and talk to folks in your organization about attending. The workshop session outline is below:

Enterprises are asking themselves: do social networks offer real value or are they just an excuse for workers to waste time? To cut through the hype, Burton Group conducted an extensive study to discover how organizations are addressing social networking, listening to 21 organization tell their stories in over 30 interviews involving around 65 people from business and IT departments. The interviews covered topics such as making the business case, metrics, compliance, talent, generational shifts, community building, technology concerns, and cultural factors.

This workshop will discuss the study’s findings: what’s working, what isn’t, and how organizations are delivering real business value from social networking initiatives.

Today, we formally announced our findings from the field research project on social networking conducted August-November 2008. The press release is below. Also, we are making the initial project summary document available as a free download (the link follows the press release reference). Finally, I will be conducting a live webcast today which you can attend (the link to that session is embedded in the BrightTalk clip. This webcast will occur 3:00 ET today. If your schedule is already booked, don't worry - the session will be available for playback as well. You can catch all the Burton Group webcasts on our BrightTalk channel.

Burton Group Uncovers the Realities of Social Networking in the Enterprise - MSNBC Wire Services - msnbc.com

SALT LAKE CITY, UT - Burton Group, a research and consulting firm focused on in-depth analysis of enterprise information technologies, has conducted a detailed field study analyzing social networking within the enterprise.

Almost universally, organizations participating in the study felt they were behind their competitors -- or the market in general -- when it came to internal social networking initiatives. Based on the results of this study, Burton Group concludes that such perceptions are unfounded. Many organizations are yet to make an enterprise-wide decision on social networking tools. Even in those organizations that have set a direction, many of those projects are in proof-of-concept or early stages of deployment.

The media, blogs, and vendors are all abuzz about social networking tools, and some enterprises have started to roll them out. When discussing the topic with Burton Group clients, the rationale behind social networking initiatives often falls into one or more of the following: expertise location, community building, and talent management. In some cases, IT viewed social networking as a technology endeavor. This perspective was especially common when social networking functions were already part of existing collaboration platforms. In those situations, IT organizations felt it was sufficient to just “turn on” those features rather than look at vendor alternatives. However, even in cases where strategists had identified business and IT drivers for social networking projects, many still had a noticeable level of uncertainty regarding the business case and return-on-investment from such tools. Given this large-scale uncertainty, Burton Group initiated an in-depth field research study to help clients understand the business, organizational, and technical factors to consider when formulating social networking strategies and initiating internal projects

March 09, 2009

In a few weeks, I'll be in Philly covering the AIIM conference and visiting clients in the area. I'll also be sharing some of the findings from our field research study on the topic of social networking within the enterprise. If you are attending, feel free to drop bye.